Hedvig flutters in carrying $18m in fresh VC greenbacks

Storage storage storage storage storage. Clear? Good

Software storage startup Hedvig has gone and got itself an $18m Series B funding round just two months after its A-round, suggestive of a sudden change in its priorities.

The company, founded by Avinash Lakshman in 2012, aims to bring Facebook-style scale-out storage and its commodity component economics to enterprise data centres. Lakshman is credited with building Amazon's Dynamo, the NoSQL precursor, and Apache Cassandra for Facebook.

Hedvig's Distributed Storage Platform (DSP) offers, we hear block, object and file access, is better than Ceph and does deduplication with no data access penalty.

The company announced a $12.5m A-round of funding in April this year when it came out of stealth. The latest round takes total funding to $30.5m and the cash will be used to pay for global expansion of its business infrastructure.

Why is this sudden dash for growth taking place? We'd guess it's because the software-defined storage space is hotting up with storage hardware companies saying they are software-defined as well as storage software-only companies, like Hedvig saying they are software-defined, making for a highly confused market sector, which is further mixed up by different styles of storage data access: file, block and object, and storage unit architecture; cloud, hyper-converged, scale-up, scale-out or a mixture of these.

Hedvig is one of a number of recent software-only storage startups, think Maxta and Sprtingpath, mixing it with existing suppliers like Nexenta and DataCore. It wants to build itself a good strong base of customers as fast as possible before being software-defined becomes too vacuous a term to be useful.

All of them are hoping that commodity hardware component developments mean their clever software mixed with cheap and powerful hardware means they have price/performance/anti-lock-in advantages over hardware+software storage suppliers. ®

Bootnote

Hedvig is a German word, used as a female first (given) name in Scandinavian countries. The German word comes from Old High German with hadu meaning “battle” and wīg also meaning battle. Literally it would mean “battle battl”e. Sounds appropriate for a startup taking on existing suppliers.

Younger readers will also know Hedwig as the owl in the Harry Potter franchise.